Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you to the officials for the presentation.
It has certainly evolved a long way since I was a child and every town seemed to have the air raid siren. Does anybody remember the air raid siren test when you were a youngster? I do. Some of my colleagues might not; I'm a lot older.
So things have evolved a long way, and by and large, I think Canadians are typically very impressed with the way the various levels of government respond to emergencies. There are always questions afterwards; it seems inevitable.
My first question, in my seven minutes, relates to this. In the first moments of a quickly emerging disaster of whatever kind, somebody, somewhere, has to make the critical decision. In the next ten seconds something has to start here. In the next few moments something has to start. In creating a national emergency management system with this bill, is there a single person or group that on behalf of all levels—accepting that it might be just a local fire, but on anything significant, is there any doubt about who is making the first, instantaneous call on what happens?
You could have a 9/11 kind of situation, which is one type of potential disaster when it involved planes in the air, or a very different kind of emergency, such as the ice storm.
It's sort of like the big bang theory. Something happens in the first instance after the big bang, which is still a mystery, but certainly we don't want any mysteries when it comes to this.
Could you just walk me through the moments of a disaster?